


Stories by a Cow

by DistantFieldsofRice



Series: Memoirs for Haikyuu [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: 4'33 by John Cage, Ace Farms, Artists, Bonding, Cereal, He's a stalker, Hot Chocolate, I can't get the Summer of Evolution stageplay opening out of my head, I considered naming it Ushiwaka Farms but nah, I don't know how these chapter things work, Inflation, Like the piece in which the musician doesn't play anything, Milk, Miyagi Prefecture, STILL DON'T KNOW HOW THESE TAGS WORK, Sendai City, Sendai City Gym, Shiratorizawa, Sorry the last piece was trash, Summer break, Tendou's mother owns a restaurant, Train Rides, Trains, Ushijima and Tendou before 2nd Year, Ushijima eavesdropping, Ushijima is pretty OOC, Volleyball, Volleyball Camp, Water, What Have I Done, Yokohama, business executives, chapstic, chauvinists, chewable vitamins, dead phones, didn't revise much either, farmers, lots of singers, makes no sense to me, mothers' midlife crises, my commas, reconnecting, sniffing people, so is tendou, tendou calls up radio stations, these kids watch weird stuff, too much Salonpas, too much perfume, tries and fails to use accents, where are my commas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-03 19:54:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14576448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DistantFieldsofRice/pseuds/DistantFieldsofRice
Summary: It's the August before Ushijima's second year of high school. He decides to reconnect with an old friend.





	1. Food

       In the muggy August before my second year of high school, I spent a good deal of time reconnecting with a friend who I haven't talked to for a while. His name was Tendou, and we had found a common ground in the fact that both our families found us strange, that we both played volleyball, and that both our mother's midlife crises were synched up almost exactly, unbeknownst to them. But while my mother's solution was to start Erhu lessons in Sendai, which was a standard enough crisis medication, Tendou's motherー who had much more time to spare and a much wealthier husbandー settled on opening a restaurant in the very same Sendai City. 

       This restaurant was a very ambiguous restaurant. Like the little chewable vitamins you're given as a childー they could have Vitamin C, iron, zinc, magical chemicals to make you right-handed, you can't be entirely sureー it was all-encompassing. The restaurant was a place of large, family-sized booths in the back and bars in the front, a place of jazz at brunch, Classical music in the afternoon, and Luck Life hits at night. The place was androgynous. It sold  _food._

       I would spend days at a time staying with Tendou in the city, and together we helped his mother plaster the restaurant windows with different signs in order to attract as many demographics as we could think of. There was a great, fluttering Japanese flag above the door to bring in all the chauvinists, and an Ace Farms banner for the farmers (or whatever). We even printed out a fake A-grade health rating from a sketchy website, but to be honest, that probably scared more people than it drew in. An A-rating is standard, really, and if you're that proud of having an A-ratingー so proud that you would put in on full view in your window when you aren't required toー there has to be something off.

 

       At the beginning, business was slow. As expected. Word had to be spread, of course; people need to find the restaurant and eat there and love it and tell their friends, and those people need to eat there and tell their friends, and so on so forth. This meant that the two waiters, Tendou and I (Tendou because his mother was making him and I because I was his friend, I believe), could spend hours kicking our feet up in one of the family-sized booths. There was a third waiter, a college student named Mado, but he was actually paid, and much too serious. Even more than me, and Tendou didn't like him. He often passed our booth with a broom or a mop or a bottle of cleaning solution and a rag, lips pursed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I messed up somewhere. If you spot it, please let me know! I'm open to constructive criticism, too.  
> Writing style is still ancient. Sorry about that last piece, guys. I have no idea what I was thinking. I'm going to restart with this one.  
> Thanks for reading!


	2. Everything is Off and I am Hungry

       A favourite family-booth pastime of Tendou's was to call up any radio station that would have him, armed with a variety of ridiculous accents. Once he got on the local news with a heinous fake American and blabbed for fifteen minutes about vandalism in Yokohama. The accent was really bad. But it wasn't so bad that, if you didn't know he was putting it on, there was a one-hundred percent guarantee it was fake. You couldn't call him out on it, because there was always the small possibility that he was, in fact, a real live Americanー he just happened to be one with a really bad head cold.  
       "And whay is Yokohama," Tendou shouted over the phone, this time in what could maybe pass as Irish. "Suddenlay the playce to be? It was my playce beefore all these organisayshons and bizness execyutives mooved in. Where is de culture. Whay is it everyone's citay now?"

       Sometimes Tendou's mother, a very elusive and strong-smelling woman, would make an appearance in her restaurant to check up on things, and we would have to temporarily close down the radio operation. The perfume she wore, probably a very expensive brand that must've been labelled as floral and feminine on the bottle, was so overpowering that it reminded me more of buckets and cans of Salonpas being splashed into the Sendai City Gym. You could tell she wore way too much of it. It might have been the right amount of perfume for an average-sized woman, but she was tiny, less than five feet; the ratio of perfume to woman was terribly off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I'm open to constructive criticism!
> 
> Sorry for the short chapters. I'm not sure if I'll make the others longer or not, but I'll try.
> 
> Check out my buddy, FeelsLikeTea.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	3. Unfortunate People Who Don't Play Volleyball

       The August before my second year of high school, I took the subway between Sendai and my town about twice a week. It's a wildly popular route, and generally, the newer, better, power-outlet-equipped trains are the ones reserved for the wildly popular routes. This was a trend I relied very heavily upon.

       One Friday after volleyball practice, I arrived at the station, my uncharged phone swinging in hand, but up pulled a screeching, bulbous hunk of scratched metal, the likes of which I had never seen before. It was one of those rickety seventies trains, the kind with wood panelling inside and latched door handles and low seats (because people were exponentially shorter in the seventies, or because I'm exponentially taller than everyone) so you could see and hear and touch the dandruff flaking off the heads of people sitting in front of you. Within five minutes on this outletless train, my phone was dead and I was forced to remove my earbuds.

       I've never been one to jot down the things I overhear, but I remember a suited man chatting business into a headset, a mother and daughter reading facts off the inside of an Ace Farms' bottle cap ("children grow faster in the spring") and two students, maybe a little older than me, chatting a few rows ahead. According to one, a spurt of inflation was coming. A spurt of inflation was coming, and train tickets and tinted chapsticks were going to start costing much more than what she was used to paying for them, and what could she start skimping on to save money? Rent? She could maybe move to a smaller apartment; she liked applying chapstick more than she liked going to parties and restaurants anyway. Milk? Maybe milk. She could start eating her cereal straight out of the box, or with water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Haha, schoolwork, auditions, homework, more schoolwork, even more schoolwork, and Avatar the Last Airbender.
> 
> Time to scream.


	4. 4'33

       On my train ride with no music, two people sat in the seat to the left of mine. One for the first half of the ride and one for the second. The first, an elderly woman who was exceptionally tall for her age. While she was next to me she told me I looked bored, and so I told her about my earbuds and dead phone. She chuckled and asked me if I had ever heard of 4'33, the famously controversial piece by composer John Cage, and I said I hadn't. She explained with precision that the piece consisted of three movements in which the performer(s) refrained from playing their instrument(s) for four minutes and thirty-three seconds exactly. 4'33 could be performed by a single performer on any instrument, or by an orchestra of performers on any number of instruments. It could be performed by a cat.

       "The aim, of course," the woman said. "Is to get the audience to focus on their surroundings with the same attention that they would usually expend in listening to a world-renowned composer. To get them to absorb the little things."

 

       The second person to sit next to me took up the woman's vacant seat almost as soon as she left it. He was a skinny teenager with nothing but a skateboard, a notebook, and a pen. For the duration of the ride he held the notebook out in front of him, his pen in hand, but he never seemed to write anything. I took a peek at his open page and saw only a few weak noun-verb pairings written:  _Fish flop. Birds squawk. Love swells._

       Finding this interesting I later told Tendou. Tendou later told the radio.

       "Lerv duz sweel," he commented. "In foke moosic particyulerly, 'n mebee in  _Shuumatsu no Lerv Song_ by Misuki Nana. In Meeyagi sweells the yooniversul reeluctence to come down from da mountens, but by the theerd verse, thet's yusually where we've ended up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Words words words words words words words words words words words words word swords words words words words word swords words words words words words words words words words chicken words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words.
> 
> Thanks for reading! I rushed through this and there might be some big errors. Feel free to point it out. Constructive criticism is welcome.


	5. Don't Want to Leave

       At the end of every weekend I spent with Tendou there was that dreaded time of having to leave his home. It made no sense to me, though. We would go back to Shiratorizawa and spend every weekday in the same dorm, spend every lunch in the same cafeteria sitting at the same table with the same friends. We would stay up late helping each other with homework and watching cop shows on Tendou's surprisingly immaculate bed.

 

       The weekend: Tendou and I would be swaddled in blankets at his house, clutching cups of hot chocolate and watching some ridiculous teen drama, and his mother would call upstairs that I was leaving in an hour. We would turn to each other, profess: "I don't want to leave" and "I don't want you to leave", in turn, and in moment of passion and love for my friend I would whip up the courage to call my mother and beg her to please, please, please let me extend my stay to the next day, my argument being that while I'd be gone the house would be empty and therefore privy to loud, extravagant Erhu playing. Usually this worked, but occasionally it didn't, and I'd have to get up, get on the train, and go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a grammar error somewhere. I know it.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	6. Volleyball Camp

       In the summer, my team and I went to a camp for volleyball with a few other schools across Miyagi. Tendou was unable to go because his mother needed his help to manage her restaurant. We were lonely without the Guess Monster.

       While I wasn't paying attention, the restaurant began to take off. Farmers and chauvinists and artists and business executives and all the other people were million around Sendai seemed to love the place, and after a month or two, there were even regulars. The most frequent visitors were lucky enough to catch Tendou's mother, who they beckoned over to their bar stools and embraced. Regulars could be identified as such because they all started smelling faintly of her.

       But I wasn't around to meet and sniff these people, to see the restaurant in full, ambiguous swing. By that time I was forcing liberos and the rest of the back row to receive my near-unreceivable spikes at a homogenous high school, where every restaurant around sold specifically thin-crust pizza, or specifically clam chowder, or specifically stir fry with a culturally appropriate take-out box. Tendou would call me on the radio from his booth many miles away, probably wrapping the landline cord around his finger with his feet propped up on the table, and probably with a disapproving Mado scowling nearby. In the background, I could almost hear the noise, the cars outside, the chatter, and even more distant,  _Namae Wo Yobu Yo_ by Luck Life. It sort of meshed together somehow.

       "We miss ye veery much here, darlin'," Tendou would say, smiling into the phone. "But newbody can stey awey fr'm home fer too long, er they will stert to seem like someone else."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's done.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I messed up somewhere. If you spot it, please let me know! I'm open to constructive criticism, too
> 
> Writing style is still ancient. Sorry about that last piece, guys. I have no idea what I was thinking. I'm going to restart with this one.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
